This morning the paperback copy of my novella, The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1, went live at CreateSpace, and will soon be at Amazon. This was a long time coming. I published the e-book version of this in October 2012. At that time I had a place-holder cover, a poor one I had someone at work throw together for me. The cover made the book not worthy of inclusion in the Smashwords premium catalog, and thus was not available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. Not her fault: she did exactly what I asked her to do. Finally, about two months ago, I found time to put together a better cover. I did this using G.I.M.P., and am pretty sure I blogged about this here.

Finally, last weekend the formatting of the print book version came to the top of my to-do list. That took one evening, working with headers, footers, page numbers, table of contents, page sizes, etc. That was the easy part. Then came the cover, which was the hard part, given the combination of lack of artistic talent and knowledge of graphic arts software. But I managed to do it. CreateSpace accepted the cover on the first submittal, so I did something right with the mechanics. The back cover text was messed up. When I redid it it was still messed up (tiny size), so a friend at work helped me create a PDF of it for submittal. It worked; I swapped out the cover and used a slightly modified interior file; and clicked “publish”. It went live this morning at CreateSpace, and will soon make its way to Amazon proper.

I have seven pre-orders so far, and hoping to get twenty. That will be a very nice boost to my June sale figures.